Latham storms PM's turf

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Over the past fortnight the atmosphere of Australian party politics experienced significant change. One curious chapter was closed; a new, unpredictable, chapter opened up.

The old chapter began at the time of the Tampa crisis and the Howard Government's decision to solve the asylum seeker problem by the use of military force, the Prime Minister delivered to both Kim Beazley and Pauline Hanson what is most accurately described as a political king hit. From this blow One Nation never recovered. It has taken the Labor Party almost 21/2 years to return to reasonable health.

The strangeness of the period from September 2001 until now can most easily be demonstrated like this: After Tampa a Senate inquiry into Government mendacity in the children overboard affair produced a potentially very damaging majority report. It had virtually no effect. In this period John Howard involved Australia in an unlawful invasion whose purpose was to disarm Iraq of weapons which, it turned out, did not exist. He lost no popularity or credibility as a result. If times had been normal, such events would have caused the Prime Minister real grief. In fact, neither disturbed even slightly Howard's mastery over both his political enemies and his political friends.

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During this past fortnight Howard's apparently unchallengeable ascendancy, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, came to an end. In the first week of the parliamentary sitting, the Prime Minister was forced by Mark Latham to abandon a lifetime of support for the federal parliamentarians' ultra-generous superannuation scheme. In the second week, because of an 11th-hour rebellion inside his own party's formerly near-comatose back bench, he was required, rather humiliatingly, to promise veterans a revised package of entitlements more generous than the one his cabinet had finalised. It was as if, with Tampa, the Prime Minister had cast a spell over the Australian body politic and that, with the striking success of Latham's superannuation gambit, at long last the nation had woken from its sleep.

With the striking success of Latham's superannuation gambit, at long last the nation had woken from its sleep.

How can this sudden transformation be explained? There is, in Shakespeare's Macbeth, a wonderful line about the nature of politics: "If we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor..." What Shakespeare understood is that very frequently in politics what you have done unto others will eventually be done unto you.

At the time of Tampa, Kim Beazley, in general, offered Howard strong support. He objected only to the initial Border Protection Bill that gave to the Government unprecedentedly sweeping powers. Howard knew the public supported the use of naval power against asylum seeker boats with an almost visceral enthusiasm. He seized on Beazley's principled objection to this single bill. From this moment, until its November 2001 election defeat, Beazley Labor was described on hundreds of occasions as being "soft" on border control. This was probably the most ruthless and effective exercise in populist politics Australia has ever seen.

During the past fortnight, on an issue of infinitely less significance, Latham took up Howard's populist sword. The federal parliamentary superannuation scheme is a 10th-order issue. Yet because many people are becoming increasingly anxious about their own future financial security in our current runaway world, there are few issues that more easily excite the anti-political anger of the public than this.

Just as Beazley was compelled, after his initial resistance, to support the Howard Government's entire border protection program, so was Howard forced to support the scrapping of the parliamentary superannuation scheme. In the subsequent interviews he gave, Howard did not even pretend to believe this reform was wise. As he explained, if certain populist buttons were pushed by one side of politics, the other had no real alternative but to fall into line. This was precisely what the Labor shadow cabinet was saying privately during its post-Tampa capitulation of September 2001.

The last fortnight has real, long-term potential significance. What it suggests is that a new chapter of party politics, driven by the logic of populist competition, might be about to begin.

Populism was introduced into contemporary politics by the election of Pauline Hanson in March 1996. What she claimed to represent were the interests of those forgotten people who had been marginalised by the bipartisan racial and economic policies of the major parties and the anti-Australian attitudes found among the treacherous cosmopolitan elites. The Coalition was more threatened by Hanson than Labor. Howard answered the challenge with a conservative, populist cultural rollback campaign - concerning multiculturalism, Mabo, the republic, reconciliation and, finally, refugees.

The Prime Minister conducted this campaign by making direct contact with the people through almost daily appearances on mass-audience commercial radio. Occasionally when his Government's program was challenged in the courts, his ministers - using the classic rhetoric of populism - launched attacks on judges as unelected legislators frustrating the people's will. Howard borrowed from Hansonism the suggestion that the interests of the nation were being betrayed by a group of left-wing critics called "the elites".

Mark Latham has already shown himself to be the first Labor Party leader capable of answering the challenge of Howard's new populist age. Like Howard, he is capable of making vivid, direct connection with the public - in part because of his plain speaking; in part because he uses radio as effectively as the Prime Minister has ever done.

Like Howard, he is also capable of identifying the kind of populist issue that can destabilise his political opponents.

Latham's populism is, however, distinctive in its content and its style. Howard is a conservative populist, who focuses on the threat of national disintegration and on questions of ethnicity or race. Latham seems more a social democratic populist, who draws naturally on Labor's traditional hostility to abuses of privilege and undeserved wealth, on banks, the big end of town and parliamentary rorts. It is, in part at least, between these two forms of populism - conservative and social democratic - that this year's election might very well be fought.

Already the contest between these two kinds of populism has begun. Late last week, trumped by Latham's superannuation card, Howard opened a new game with a plan to restrict (already non-existent) asylum seeker claims to those who have actually set foot on Australian soil. There are many real problems facing this country. How much time this year will be wasted on marginalia or nonsense of this kind?

The Howard Years (Blackink), edited by Robert Manne, was published earlier this month.
E-mail: r.manne@latrobe.edu.au